Through urban planning and land-use regulation, the government wishes to avail services such as healthcare to Delhi's ever-growing population. Delhi presents itself as an interesting case in India of a strong hospital planning policy caught up in the net of market forces. As such, this thesis aims to assess the equitable allocation of hospital care services in Delhi. What options are at hand for the government to achieve a better balance in the spatial distribution of hospital services in the city? Do poorer sections of Delhi's population benefit from good accessibility to hospital services? We propose a methodology based on different measures of accessibility calculated using geographic information systems (GIS) and on exploratory multivariate statistical analysis, which we employ to map poverty in Delhi. Our results support a differentiated model of hospital services distribution. Some hospitals appear to be located in ways that substitute services for one another; for example, private tertiary and secondary hospitals are closer to more affluent areas while poorer areas have better access to small private hospitals. Nevertheless, poor neighbourhoods seem to experience situations of greater deprivation than other areas. While accessibility and proximity are only two dimensions to the issue of access to hospital care, our results tend to show that poorer areas are left with limited choice in terms of having hospital facilities located nearby. Public-Private Partnership models have favoured private tertiary care hospitals in Delhi, with very poor results so far in improving access to hospital care for the poor.
